


Losing My Favorite Game

by ninety6tears



Series: kuleshov effect [2]
Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Multi, Pon Farr, Pre-Poly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-11
Updated: 2010-01-11
Packaged: 2017-10-25 22:28:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/275534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/pseuds/ninety6tears
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jim Kirk suffers from failure to communicate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Losing My Favorite Game

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote "Basketball" and then this as a companion piece a very long time ago. Recently I've contemplated that it would feel more satisfying if I finished this little series with a third fic from Spock's perspective, and I may still do it, but it wouldn't be very soon.

Her name was Lisa and she let me make love to her approximately nine or ten times over the course of my first semester at Starfleet. It was a twenty-minute shuttle ride from one campus to the other where she was working on her master's in art history, an easy hop from stuffy mathematicians who can't mix the simplest drinks to save their asses to a not necessarily more desirable pseudo-bohemia. Everybody's obsessed with the twentieth century in too big a circumference warring with all the neon pink that is always L.A., and then Starfleet. That's basically what I saw of California: the Academy, the big cities, and a handful of too-quiet bars on the campus that swooned in these Iowa-like colors around Lisa's apartment building.

I wonder how I wound up there so many times when I got weekend leave, but she was a nice girl. Woman. Her room was unusually cluttered with all kinds of bulky, boxy old contraptions. I didn't know what the hell they were until she’d slide some hand-sized plastic thing into some other dusty mess and it would be a visual or audio recording of something or other, and she rarely touched them anyway, they were just antiques.

Lisa made fun of me all the time and consistently reminded me that she didn’t usually hang out with guys like me; I'd agree, “No, you don’t,” and then I'd kiss her like she was hands-down the most beautiful woman I had ever known, and there were days when the room smelled just a certain way that I almost believed she was. I don't have much of anything to say about her. I mention her because she is, as circumstance would have it, one of the few people who has ever really taught me anything.

There was this early morning I was trying to distract her from working on her dissertation while an astronaut in an orange jumpsuit was crawling through a barren spaceship on her PADD screen, and I guess I actually asked her what she was writing about. Let's have Lisa shyly explain:

"Lev Kuleshov was a big deal in Soviet filmmaking. He did this thing where he shot all this footage of a pretty famous Russian actor just sitting there with no expression on his face at all, and then he edited it spliced with these different images. I think it was a plate of food, and then a girl holding a doll, and a woman in a coffin. And then he played it to these audiences who professed that the actor was reacting to the images and his face wasn’t the same in every shot. They were even impressed with the hunger, grief, etcetera, that he was able to portray... So ‘the Kuleshov effect’ generally refers to how the editing process manipulates reactions to the film."

I remember saying that those audiences must have been really stupid. "I mean, come on." She got annoyed, so I articulated a little better, something like, "People's willingness to project the emotions they _want_ to feel onto other things has probably changed a lot."

"That's basically my thesis," she said with a smile. "How cynicism has constrained or also possibly improved art over the centuries."

I laughed and got out, "Well." And then she pushed me onto my back and we fucked while the sun came up, her body illuminated in stripes by the blinds, interchangeably pale and bronze. I would forget this detail, but I remembered it again later on. I was reminded.

When I met Spock, he looked to me more like background than person, passionless, more circuits than sense. Because of his barely moving eyes and mouth and that stern posture, I thought of that Russian actor; I remembered Lisa. Oh, I was still a cynic.

There are two things I can think of that I am truly ashamed of. The first thing:

After Vulcan went, I kept _looking_ at Spock, not in sympathy, just waiting to see if he'd crack. There was something smacked-on when he beamed back, sure, but then he was on the bridge doing everything by the book. I was looking at him and there was nothing, nothing, more nothing. His planet had just gotten crushed out of existence like something murky shrinking down a drain, slurp slurp, millions dead and gone, and I didn't see it on him anywhere.

I didn't think I liked him very much. But hey, I'd been wrong before.

And this is the part I can't stand: I thought at one point that day, _At least it happened to somebody like the Vulcans._ I scanned Spock’s face here and there, only saw devoid precision, total control, and yes, I thought to myself that it could have been worse. At least it happened to him. I thought this.

I believe pretty firmly in a principle of "What you think isn't what you do," but I have a hard time living by it. I have before kept things stuffed dryly into pockets of my mind, abused my own desires to the point that I did not recognize them and maybe somehow didn't have them anymore. Or at least I unconsciously hoped so, but it doesn't work that way.

Rationalizing the second thing goes like—and I could probably never say this out loud—My heart broke in some way when he broke hers, when she broke his. I really had to believe in what it was for some reason, and maybe seeing it bomb with somebody like Uhura just confirmed some nagging impossibility in my mind, all the while opening up a couple very uneasy possibilities, and I just felt a little knocked around like I was dreading something the day their relationship was over. Maybe this is why I have no memory of how I somehow ended up taking her home in the middle of trying at all costs to completely avoid her after I heard the news, knowing like an obnoxious tapping in the back of my mind, it had nothing to do with me, but my place in the equation was inescapable: _I am going to get hurt._

I managed not to really see her for most of the day up until she caught my eye sort of on accident, standing between one table and the entrance to the rec room; I remember the way she looked and how it seemed like I had no _choice_ but to do something really stupid, and how she almost seemed to know that. We both needed something to grab onto, and the thing that makes it the worst is that it could have gone so much more innocently without either of us trying to prove anything. I wanted her to stop looking like that and she was taking me by the arm like she'd lost her way out after I mumbled something nice, and I just wonder what I could've said to make her lose the idea that she had any reason to resent me, because then we were alone and everything went wrong.

She could've gotten me by the gut no matter how she managed to slip the word "jealous" into the conversation, because yes, hell, I understand that. But she was unaware, I'll assume, that an even more powerful word would have been "vicarious."

Either way, she was practically daring me to prove to her whether I'd lost or won something that day. By the time it was done I think we both knew it was an uneasy combination of both. What you think and what you do is not the same thing. What we did might have been even worse.

What I did got me staring in irritation at a chess board in the middle of a boring week while my relatively new relationship with my first officer was being held at arm's length by my "tendency for contemplation" that made Spock decide to leave me alone most times we tried to spend some time together. We were at "that" stage in friendship, and anyone would know the one I'm talking about, relationship with half-Vulcan or none. Parameters were not established, and if they were ever going to be, one of us had to make the first move. I had no doubt the day that I met him that this was eventually going to be me.

As if I even need to explain that I have any pride. Let's move on to the part where Spock said, "Check" and I said, "I slept with Uhura."

I expected, after a moment, "That is far too intimate a matter," "There is no need," You're just my captain I'm just your first officer she's just a woman I was previously involved with. I was impressed by the jumpy illogic of his response, evenly measured as it was:

"...When?"

"Three nights ago?"

That eyebrow, you could fill an ocean with the meanings of it, and I was scrambling through seaweed. Then I got the rational treatment.

"I appreciate your willingness to divulge this information, if I understand its significance as it might be perceived by the average...human, but I am not capable of..."

My brows went up slowly. "Jealousy?"

"I suppose that is what I mean."

"No. I can't really see you wasting your time on that," I agreed. "That doesn't make what I did okay."

"I am unfamiliar with any code of your morals that would make what you did unethical."

"It's not ethics, Spock. You know, there are certain things it's okay to do to some people but you just don't do when it's..." I leaned back, irritated, watching him squint curiously across the board. "When it's your friend. And let's not even get into Uhura..."

"If you and Uhura wish to pursue a relationship together, I would not consider it badly advised."

To my credit, I only laughed at that a little. "We both know that's bullshit."

Spock kind of flinched in confusion.

"Bull. Shit."

"I am being truthful—"

"I'm talking about the part where you aren't thinking about how it probably really happened. Do you...have an _inkling_ how badly she's hurt right now?" In irritated dismissal, I waved my hand out. "You know what, nevermind. I get it."

"I assure you that I have an 'inkling'," he remarked, maybe with a note of bitterness. He seemed to try to consider his next move, but couldn't help sitting back and looking at me. "If you could please clarify the reason for your irritation, Captain, if I have offended you—"

"If you are just gonna sit there like you don't give a damn about this—Your lack of disappointment? It's offensive."

"That seems hardly a rational standpoint. My approval," he said slowly, "of you and Uhura both, provides more reason to be dismissive of this situation than it does for me to find it repugnant."

"No," I said bluntly. "That's not how it works."

"Would you care to enlighten me then, on how it does 'work'?"

He was doing his best condescending jerkoff; I rolled my eyes.

"Recent events hardly recommend me as capable of following human standards as far as personal relations are concerned." With a not very gentle but quieter edge, he warned, "Perhaps you should adjust your expectations."

"Right, well." I stood up.

"...Where are you going?"

"I am getting my expectation-adjusting ass back to work."

"You left gamma shift less than an hour ago."

"Did I?"

"Jim—" he said, before the door slid shut behind me.

Just my first name, empty and inquisitive, made it hard to stay angry, if I was even mad in the first place. After all, how angry can you really be at somebody who you think should be angry at you?

I came back in an hour with an idea.

 

I should probably finish explaining about Lisa.

I've tried many times to remember which one of us stopped calling the other. All I know is that it was the summer before Nero when I spotted a guy when I was at a bar with Bones, took a minute to recognize him as a friend of Lisa's I'd met a couple times. I drifted over to say hi. I asked what she was up to lately.

He looked at me strangely, and then he informed me that she was dead.

So after that I was managing to slip the topic of something called volsciasis into the conversation once I'd stolen down the shot Bones just ordered and got called an asshole, yadda yadda yadda. I managed not to explain why I was curious about it as he explained: Very rare condition, in most cases fatal unless somebody has the mountains of cash that can get the medicine that Qo'noS hoards very well because of the prevalence of a similar disease in some areas. Long, slow death, with symptoms generally showing up pretty early.

The gist, if it's not obvious, is that Lisa very likely knew that she was dying the entire time that she knew me, and she never said a thing. It wasn't my business.

And some time later I was in a cave being force-fed compassion in the form of something like a fist through my brain, sputtering and shivering and "So you do feel"; I got back on board and then I was looking _hard_ , provoking and kicking that pain out of a man I suddenly knew with a bright instinct was supposed to be close enough to change me but would hardly look at me then longer than it took to dismiss me. When I got it out, there was a good reason for it, but I think I also just wanted to see him feel what I'd just felt, what had just been slammed into me by that mind meld.

I was trying to bring mathematics into the mess, make equations equal out until these things would just speak up for themselves. Not like the days I spent in the lecture hall thinking about Lisa's pale human complexion, the way her eyes moved at my words and down my body and squinted when I said something funny, and I was combing every sliver of her I could even remember looking for the sense in it. I remembered her face alive and smiling; I was looking for the woman in the coffin, and she was nowhere to be found.

When I'm linked with Spock, meaning dances from him, curlicues that murmer through me, down my spine, in my chest and my stomach and my heart. An echo pulse of cryptic somethings, sometimes nothings, sometimes both at once. It's a code to crack, but there's a key to the madness, a predictability. I thought I could maybe get the hang of it.

The first time, after I'd just sat crouched tightly on the floor of his room recounting in the surface of my thoughts everything that had happened with Uhura, as well as all the toils of unmentionable emotion attached to it, I thought I felt a flare of something in him responding to what I felt. I _thought_ I did. It was so _odd_ and I had no idea what it meant and even then, I was hooked. When the vivid connection was pulled out of me, it was sort of an accident, I think, that just a loose thread was still there. I mumbled, "Wait...I think we're..."

He apologetically reached up his hand to sever the last of it. And I grabbed his wrist to stop him.

 

"How come your brain feels so different from his?" I asked in a hushed way when we were walking to the bridge one afternoon. "You know, with the older you it was a lot more vivid, when we..."

"Vivid?" He stopped and turned, interested enough to not tersely ignore the topic of our "recreational" treatment of it that he seemed to find unmentionable, even when he allowed it to persist without insistent protest. He was surprised by my question, just realizing something. "It was likely not the first time he'd melded with you, then. He may have been practiced at projecting his thoughts in a way you would understand."

"So we could get better at this?"

As an ensign passed us in the hallway, Spock's eyes shifted over at me and back. "...Theoretically. But I'm sure if you consulted the other Jim Kirk's logs, as you have been doing more often than you should, you would find accounts of purely logical reasons to initiate mind melds, as opposed to this..." He trailed off, cause even he didn't know what the hell to call it.

This gets hard to explain, what exactly it was. It was different all the time. I would have a hard time explaining something so we'd meld and stay linked for a couple weeks until it just faded out. Sometimes it just naturally happened when we were alone after a hard day, no verbal explanation or excuse attached. It wasn't as strong as what he'd once had with this girl on Vulcan, I would have tried to tell somebody like Bones that it was just for fun if he'd ever figured out enough to ask, but it would have been a lie.

Obviously I have a couple reasons to value my privacy, but the thing is: When one of us was doing most of the feeling, most of the heavy lifting, it gave me a lot of the power. I would not deny that it gave me an interesting pleasure to constantly contaminate his mental space with my irrational spurts, even with his ability to control how much it affected him. I would even sometimes feel that, a terse pressure resisting against the link when I thought up something a little too potent, particularly if I did it as a form of mental conversation. I would smirk and feel it anyway; we'd spar back and forth.

And I loved it, being able to sense him when we weren't in the same room, as faint as it was. I wondered now and again what I "looked" like, what I felt like in that sense. Was he more sensitive, did he detect my moods changing depending on what room I was in, when I stepped into the shower, when I got an undesirable message, when I spotted something I wanted.

I would be lying—through my teeth and through my bones—if I denied ever finding anything sort of erotic about all that.

Maybe I don't know what it was. Otherwise I might have tried to explain it to Nyota sooner, as if it wasn't hard enough with things being kind of closer and far apart with us at the same time after what happened. Up until that strangeness on Iota II that made it kind of work itself out, I figured she'd never find out, and I wasn't sure why that seemed kind of wrong.

I remember earlier in the morning before that mission, when I saw her in the gym, thinking how saddening it had kind of become. I did the lazy pseudo-flirting in the way we'd managed to act in every way like nothing had changed around everybody else ever since she put her clothes back on and left my cabin a year before that, and how I had started to wish with an intensity that sort of surprised me that nothing actually had, not really knowing how different things really had to be or were supposed to be.

I don't know how many people would believe that I honestly never thought about any tangible possibility of winding up in bed with her, ever, before that one night. I never really did, but it would be a harsh oversimplification to say that it was about the chase, the nonstop joke with her that had started when we met. I just adored her and never stopped. And there are few things I despise more than seeing her kind of lose it a little, but we just kept getting pushed in that direction. I hated it. I wished we could go back.

As Bones and I walked off to the lockers that morning, he was scowling. After hitting the underused showers off of the gymnasium to avoid having to go back to our cabins before duty, I finally gave him this look instead of outright asking, 'Man, what is it?'

He just sighed, dismissive, “Nevermind.” I accepted this and continued putting my jersey on until he couldn't help it. He asked, “How long have you been sleeping with Uhura?”

I was still a little tangled in the shirt, my hair probably all messed up, and I was laughing, coughing, scoffing all at once. “What.”

“Oh, please, Jim. There’s a way people act, you know, there’s a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ and I feel like I must have completely missed it when the ‘before’ was over.”

I attempted to express with a look my cynicism of that attitude. “You think there has to be a reason she talks to me a little more? Other than becoming a respectable part of my crew?”

“No, no...It was different when it became professional, yeah, but don’t tell me it’s not different all over again.”

Once my shirt was all the way on, I let my hands fall to my thighs, shrugging, just granting the man his evaluation. “Yeah. Whatever. I don’t know.”

He pointed a finger at me. “You haven’t denied it yet.”

“You know you’re not being much of a gentleman prying into this?”

“You’re the one in the position to be a gentleman, and I know you won’t be, so come on...Have you or haven’t you?”

Too many ticks went by before I started stuttering, “I—I’m not in the place to—”

“Oh—" Bones just gaped at me for a second. " _Jesus_ , man, _really_?”

Confused by his practically crestfallen look, I asked, “Why does it matter?”

“You really need to ask?” he returned gruffly. “ _Nyota Uhura_ slept with you? It’s like finding out there’s no Santa Claus.”

“Look...it’s not like you think, it was just once. And a while ago.” That earned me a piercingly curious look. With a shrug I quietly admitted, “It was a year ago. It was...after Spock. You know, like right after.”

And Bones then fell into a different kind of disappointment. “Oh, Jim. Are you a complete son of a bitch?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. As far as we’re both concerned, it didn’t happen.” I looked up and before he could say anything else on the matter, added, “And I like it that way.”

He seemed to understand the roughness of the subject, just shook his head and lightly remarked, "Chasing her skirt all over campus for a couple years and you like it that way."

I gave a self-mocking shake of my head as I shoved a garment down the cleaning chute. "I can't resist a paradox."

 

Sometimes, though, I don't wish that things were like they used to be? Like what happened on Iota II, which was sort of round two of "Let's do this and never talk about it later," but in a kind of fun and wonderful and completely accidental way. It was kind of funny how we didn't even think about what we were doing: I just made this crack that broke off the frigidness of the topic after explaining to her about this whole unexplainable bond _thing_ , and next thing I know she's okay with this little pantomime which, by the way, I meant completely, maybe too much. It started out as a joke and ended in something that would have made more sense in a dream, but I did not kiss her on that planet; Spock did.

I remember how the smell of her mingled with the sweet of the orchard, the noise of our breath singing in the silence as my hand roamed down her body and how that was the last thing before I stopped. And I was anxiously hooking the blindfold that was my favorite tie up off her eyes, and I couldn't tell, but I saw maybe a mist coming over them. I heard myself asking if she was okay, but it seemed like a weird thing to ask.

“Yes,” she replied, and I can’t ever get enough of these things, the way her voice is crisp and clear, soured up instead of a groggy fall-apart mess when she gets sad. I know I felt something real for her right then; it was on the tip of my tongue, a statement just reaching to exist, but I wouldn’t have known what it meant if I'd said it out loud. I was back in myself, not knowing what I was doing, but the whole sense of her was the same.

...Okay, so I kissed her too.

She'd asked me that day what it was I wanted, and it would seem after all that I am definitely one to covet things. Sometimes, yes, after months of curtsying through my personal associations I got restless, practically composed of desire itself and nothing else. But there were some days or some nights—the night after that little mission definitely being one of them—when I felt not so much filled with want as another way of wasting my energy.

I felt sometimes like I was full-up, brimming and busting open with so much simple and stupid love, and no one was taking it out of me; nobody wanted it, nobody knew.

 

I seem to have a pretty good idea of everything I was dancing around, but I can't completely explain this fact: that some part of me has just flat-out decided that one of these days I'm going to lose him for good.

I have cynically consulted what the psychologists would say and it all has too much to do with my upbringing, which I'm under the impression I very much survived. Maybe I just have this idea that sooner or later anything and everything is going to abandon me, but I would classify my attitudes more in the category of not taking anything for granted. I don't dream or fear or think so vividly: Spock's face does not attach itself to my father or anyone else when he almost gets himself killed. Nothing stitches together or compartmentalizes in any way that makes me able to analyze how particularly fucked I would be without him. It just hurts.

The thing about pain, Bones once said to me on the Academy grounds over a lunch, is you don't really remember it afterwards. I'd muttered that he had clearly never been stung by a jellyfish, recounting a family vacation and the very unique and annoying sort of itching burn of it. I've acquired in space travel a couple other examples of profound and extremely difficult to describe aches and itches, and none of them even come _close_ to what I eventually learned is called _pon farr_ : That first little writhing voice of it was both obscure and overpowering at once, not exactly painful, not uncomfortable in any kind of familiar way when I got the little scraps of it through last week's mind meld leftovers. Was it wanting? It didn't feel like wanting. But my experience is not particularly objective, after all.

All I could think about was the fact that he was possibly going to die, as I somehow, somehow managed to convince Bones that I needed an hour with Spock, alone, in a locked medical bay, and that he did not want to know, and that if Spock was still dying when he came back I would probably just let him kill me so there was really no point in threatening.

In a flickering moment of my life that stripped and packed all of my reservations away, I did anything and everything that felt right, words thoughtlessly mumbling past the constant lump in my throat. I felt the more proximal shocks riding through me, coming off him, as I slipped onto the bed next to him. I needed a moment to gather my senses. The state he was in by then practically looked like some kind of seizure. It just felt like I was talking to myself, comforting myself, when my unrecognizable voice started in with, "Baby?...Come on..."

My hand rubbed down his chest, and I _felt_ it, oh _God_ , how was that happening? Something was clinging farther into me like a flame devouring paper, and—This would be me recounting how absolutely impossible it is to get hard thinking that somebody's gonna die, if not for the fact that I was suddenly terribly turned on, not losing my mind, but quite a bit past uncomfortable at that point. Somehow I guess it gave me more of a sense that it was going to work, so with nervous, patting motions I managed to start undressing both of us, constantly muttering little soothing words to him because it made me feel better. Finally his breath seemed to kick up differently. I thoughtlessly went in, kissed him on the lips.

As far as I was concerned, my mouth was kissing lips that did not kiss, I was touching the untouchable, with an almost destroying and detached sense about the fact that this could even be happening at all. It was just too surreal, after the break-up and coming to know him better and feeling all the lack of this through his many layers of feeling, telling myself I might as well be wanting an inanimate object, it was a fruitless and pointless thing: His body rose up to greet mine like a sheet catching a gust of air, knees up, arms, his ribs nibbling hard into mine and his cock made the checklist too, I noticed, as it seemed like all I could think to do was rub and squeeze my right hand against the back of his neck like it was my only handle on sanity as I touched the rest of him in some shaky mockery of invitation.

In response to his growing urges my voice was weak, a mingling of hissing heat and reassuring softness. "Yeah, hey, hey, come on. Spock..."

All of my control over the situation was slipping, the searing red behind my vision beginning to run its own course and flare up with every surface where we touched. His lips were clumsily responding, and I had time to notice what was uncharacteristically fierce but at least _present_ in his eyes before he bucked over and knocked my body under his, and _then_ , I don't know. Hands came in an unfamiliar hunger to the sides of my face and were clutching through some of my hair and then fingers were grazing deliberately over my pulse and I barely realized anything at all before I was thrown in, something boiling in my veins, senses surrendering to a blurry burn of everything and nothing at once, and I don't remember—I can't remember—

Everyone on the _Enterprise_ knows that Spock means a lot to me. People talk about it, I know they do. There's something peculiar and contradictory about us and I guess constant rumor attempts to define it. Bones, I know, doesn't think much of anything either way because he understands that it is what it is and doesn't care, but I remember that it kind of unsettled even him to see me looking the way I did when he told me that Spock might be dying earlier. When the nurses were still trying to help and I just felt this pull, like I had to see him, an irrational surge that had nothing to do with this scorching in the back of my brain; after how many times, having a job like this, that I tell myself that I would have to be okay under the pressure if something like this happened, even I can think on it and be surprised at the thrashing that was taking over in me, making we want to just shake Bones, plead with him, No you don't understand. I need to, I need, That's my man in there.

I don't know how long it was before Spock came out of it just enough to control the force of his mind moving through mine and slipped himself out of the connection as much as he could manage—thinking he was doing me a kindness, violating me less, I don't even know. But I sort of woke up, and this was me losing control again, and how can anyone even imagine this? Thinking one minute, _He's dying, he's dying_ , and everything just churns and blows over and then I come up on the surface warm and loose, floating on waves and waves of something so fucking good I can hardly breathe, and I'm with him I'm with him I'm with him I'm with him; I feel everything.

There were words I didn't know spanning through his thoughts and every-color flames and senseless memories and also shame and that was only one percent, the rest was a constant sourceless pulsing on every skin cell of _yes_ , _this_ , _please_ , and it rang through me so raw that I felt myself emitting these shouts and moans that never stopped even though I don't know how I ever took a breath. And it went on and _on_ : Getting off was like cleaning out a gun instead of shooting it, wringing me out, reaching in and scrubbing me clean. Something was so separately revving and processing the pleasure in my body that it was impossible to really have a handle on what was physically happening, but when my eyesight recovered from the blaring pressure and I seemed to hear him groaning in every bone of my body, I had never been more thankfully aware of anyone's life, of life at all, he was okay, he was with me, he was okay and after many varying gestured mantras of this fact I came, hard: My head slammed to the backboard and he collapsed into my collarbone, my legs trembling around him as we felt through the aftershocks at the same time.

And I flopped out. Limbs falling tiredly down and just going limp for a moment, our breaths rising and falling, my eyes trained up to the ceiling as our dizzy thoughts tried to flit around each other into some composure. He reached it first and I was Oh God I was under him and I was naked, I pushed him out, off, I said, "Look at me." Clinically.

He did, and my hand went up to brush through some strands of his hair at the back of his neck, tilting him as if there was something in particular I could possibly be looking for. I just needed to be sure, needed his eyes for a second.

The way his stuff surfaces, I can ignore it if I want to, just like you can browse a book instead of reading it. The connection had been aggressively stronger a minute before, and then it was still a sensory connection, a very strong one, but the mental barrier is tricky; I'd have to learn the language all over again for us to be that close. And I browsed. The meaning as it slowly became collected and concrete, was just a swelling sense of confusion, and blunt humiliation. Some bodiless form of me was trying to crawl away from it as fast as possible.

So he let me get away. He reached out and it was fast: I felt the now very familiar brushing of his fingers at my face, and then I gasped sharply at the sensation, not painful but a blunt and ripping discomfort through my head that lasted only a second...

And I turned over, and I got my clothes back on and I got out of there as fast as I could, without looking back at him even once.

In the corridor, after I carelessly waved Chapel back in, it didn't take me long to run into Bones, who seemed to assume the worst when he saw me. He cut out a curse coming urgently up to me, but I stayed him with a hand motion and quickly saying, "He's fine. He'll be okay."

I was stopping and tiredly leaning against the wall without realizing it. I felt sick and tired, sore all over. I finally met his glance more lucidly as he looked me up and down in a sort of horror. In a faint groan, he demanded, "What the hell happened, man?" I don't think he expected me to answer. I don't know if he actually wanted me to. But I do know that the man is hardly stupid.

"Computer," I said. "Comm me to Lieutenant Uhura's quarters."

I found her in the mess; I felt like I hadn't seen her in years. I stumbled into some explanation about trying her cabin first before managing to apologetically confirm that Spock was going to be fine. This assurance was all she wanted before she took her coffee and left. I was glad she took off, because I didn't think I could really talk to her. I was angry with her all of a sudden, for reasons I knew didn't hold water, but all the same. I couldn't remember her ever truly pissing me off before with that cute bullshit superiority, but it all felt like the way she'd sized me up the moment we met as the person who'd whore all over anything sacred, the person you go to to get fucked back into one piece because he'll never say no.

I didn't think she had any idea at all that what I had just done had been hard for me. And it made me feel even crappier that I couldn't just be happy that my friend wasn't dead and be done with it. I needed a shower. I needed stupid things like somebody shampooing my hair for me and promising to kick me out of bed in the morning when I would surely feel like it was impossible to get up. Nostalgia, the kind that comes quaking up with total exhaustion, swept coldly over me. I wanted to go back and start everything over.

I thought, briefly, about just trashing all the information the ambassador had sent me at the start of this mission. There had been a tone of reservation in the kind of "You make up your mind whether you need these" in the good-luck message attached, and it's the last I've heard from him; the rest I read is myself. _That_ Jim Kirk and his own formal accounts of a life that isn't even supposed to be mine but is another world's doctrinal history, I wanted to erase them and I wanted to forget ever being aware of the split, just to see where the pieces might fall without any push of suggested fate.

And then only a few days later, Spock almost got himself killed all over again. And something collapsed and surrendered and yanked the captain clear out of me and into dead space. Between the times I'd been peeking through some of the accounts of a life that was and is not mine with an ambassador who both is and is not my first officer, not understanding half of a fucking thing about Spock and feeling like I'll never be an exception to his laws and now being catatonically so far beyond wanting to punch him in the face out of fear and fury, I decided maybe it was about time destiny just went and fucked itself.

Or something. I was a mess. I can't even remember what the next several days of my life were like and what I did, except for, well. I had clearly been wrong about Uhura.

I'd explained to her, on Iota II, what it is Spock feels about her, what happens when she walks in the room. The best I could say was that she makes him feel safe. I didn't tell her, ever, that she does this to me too.

I wouldn't know how to tell her whether this is only something I managed to acquire mentally from Spock or if it's all me, and to me it doesn't really matter at all. I also wouldn't like having to explain what, specifically, I even mean by that—All I know is she is both put together and full of feeling at the same time, and _no_ one does that. Everyone knows they have to stuff down and suspend their base reactions to things from time to time in this job. Not Nyota, though, she feels and she feels for everyone else every second, but she does the job, maybe with tears in her eyes but her hands don't shake ever.

This is why, when she falls apart, on some level I just completely freak out and I don't know what to do. Like I didn't know what to do when she thought she wanted to sleep with me—did want to sleep with me, it's all the same—all that time ago.

But that week she was put together, she was perfect, when I was off my second shift and she was off hers, and everything glooming to grey around my afternoon stilled and sharpened to this impossible gravity when she put her lips on me. I didn't know what was happening; she was on the table in the formal lounge, hugging me between her legs and tasting so good against me, like I'd never once kissed her before. I was trying not to calm into it too much; I had to be sure.

I don't want to say that what happened next was some sweeter translation of the post-break-up fuck-up, and I don't want to say that it was some action of her making things up to me. So I won't, because to me, that never happened. It was not _that_ Uhura who kissed me in the lounge, it was that clean and cool cadet who blew me off ten different graceful ways all through my academy years; she had her knees shifting around my sides and looked at me all seven letters of earnest, and asked me to make us both feel good, asked me if I wanted to as if that was any kind of question at all.

I could not breathe; my mind was just chanting _oh god oh god oh god_ in a blissful vertigo all the way to my quarters until I was wrapped up and inside her, my heart running brightly for cover in every one of her fingers against my back, every time she whined my name in a way that pulled me sharply back together. This sounds ridiculous, but what it felt like, you would think nobody had ever wanted me before even once. And God knows I wanted her back. I made sure she felt it.

So my days became sleepwalking through my duties, mumbling through paperwork and protocol with Spock, and not all but some of my nights, for a time, against all odds, I was with Uhura. At first it seemed she just had a soft soul after all that was unexplainably more able to bear my company when I was in pain, but I was so much myself, sometimes pretty happy, just being with her.

One time she mentioned I should stop in and was in the shower when I got to her cabin. I crept in after her, gave her a neck massage, and many minutes after I was on the floor licking through the creeks pouring down her body as she came in a long sweet note sitting on my lap. We laughed, untangling our legs in the cramped space so she could reach the soap that she smeared into my hair with a smirk. Before we rinsed and stepped out I held her to me, and she rested her head at my collarbone and in a weird way we were kind of slow-dancing there in the shower, me just rocking her against me.

"Jim."

"Mm."

"Remember, um...when you were able to tell me how Spock feels about me? When I'm around?"

"Sure."

"I don't know why I'm suddenly curious about this. What was it like with you?"

"...With me?"

"Yeah, what...You know, what did he feel like with you?"

"I don't know."

She pulled back to look up at me, brows creasing. "You don't know?"

I was only vaguely pondering it, realizing I'd really never actually _thought_ about it, never bothered trying to piece out that puzzle as I was learning how to read him. I didn't manage to formulate an explanation before some understanding came over her face.

"I guess that would be kind of hard, when you're the...object. You said yourself it's not exactly like you're reading his mind, and there's no way of comparing it to when you're _not_ with him..."

I felt a little stupid, like this was something important I'd been blind to, I'd been putting off and out of my mind. No, I'd never felt any obvious trend in how Spock reacted to me, and I hadn't really sought one out in the way I'd always tried very hard not to make myself a hefty subject to him, out of cowardice or whatever it was. Some time after Nyota said that I just tried to put it out of my mind and I made sad love to her two times that night, before we got to the conversation that made me realize I should face the music before things tipped off an edge I didn't even know we'd been approaching.

Shortly after we'd gotten into bed, I'd said something to her and she'd kind of laughed and said, "All things considered, I think it's okay for you to call me by my first name, Jim."

I had nodded and shrugged and said, "Yeah, I know it is." Meaning okay, but I wasn't going to start. I wonder if she took it the wrong way, but some minutes later she basically told me, in a nutshell, that she wouldn't know how to believe me if I supposedly loved her, and what the fuck do you say to that? The honesty, the lack of judgment and accusation in it, was the worst. It felt like a gracefully placed cue to cut this off, this thing that was really pretty great but didn't have the legs to make it out of the bedroom, at least not yet.

I would like it a lot if we fell in love properly, actually, and maybe we will, maybe we already have, but it's not surprising that anything with Nyota Uhura should end up feeling like we perpetually have to start over, and over and over again. She is, you have to understand, better than me. She's better than pretty much anybody, and if I have her now and then, if we do this a thousand more times, she will always be impossible and she will always be new.

I know fully and badly the infinite nature of circumstances; I've been too exposed for one life to what could or should or would be, but every single time she looks my way now it's like time halts to an impossible shift, morphs and compensates to allow the mere absurdity of the affection. And those are the times during that slump that I ever felt like I could still get what I wanted, regardless of the muddled determinism; I felt the pleasant swell of confidence in my mind and my identity turning back into a declaration: My name is James Tiberius Kirk. I have beat all the odds, I have saved worlds, and I will be loved, or die trying.

It's like all of it with her now, my attempts at chivalry and simple friendship and more sophisticated adoration, is an attempt to say more than thanks. I hope she knows. I can't imagine how I would begin to try to tell her something like that.

 

On the second night of shore leave I was in the little outdoor bar, stepping a couple seats over to help Gaila get something out of her eye, and then I asked her how she's been. We were both drunk, and we talked, and I started spilling slightly too much of my guts considering our now merely acquainted, only slightly more than professional relationship. Though my every comment about anything that night seemed to just teem with some bitter abandon, a not-so-captainly temporary outlook on the world, it was hard to tell after a point if she was laughing with me or at me. Too playful and careless a person to just tell me to shut the hell up, and I seemed to keep going on just to figure out what was bothering her.

"What?" I finally managed to mumble, when I said something that made her grinning brisk and not exactly unsympathetic, more like pitying.

"Look, Cap," she said through some ironically patronizing giggles, "you just keep going on and _on_ about this stuff, and I'm just sitting here, waiting for you to explain, _sir_ , why I should actually give a shit."

I blinked, leaning a bit hazily over the table. "Well..."

"I mean, next time you want to drop your sad load on somebody, you might try to find someone in the room you weren't a huge jerk to at some point. Like...you know, somebody you didn't blatantly use?"

I was standing up again, still using the side of the table as a crutch. "You're still pissed at me. About the Kobayashi Maru? _Really_?" I accused almost in a kind of wonder, and she laughed and laughed.

"No. Not really."

"I thought..." I made some struggling, misunderstanding hand gestures, "I thought we were past that, because I sent you that..."

"Oh, yeah, that message you sent me later. Yeah, I didn't open that."

I was grabbing her arm then, feeling like I was gonna choke on my drink. "Wait. Wait wait wait, you never—you never fucking opened that letter? That I sent you after the mission, you never—?"

"No."

My mouth was probably hanging stupidly open, like this was too much, not tonight, good God, this little long-ago thing somehow felt like an enormous and cruel joke. "It...Well, it was an apology, a very _good_ apology, and you didn't even...?! And why the hell did you start being a lot nicer to me some time after if you were still...?"

"Well, you were an asshole but then you went and had to be this big hero and..." She was making these cringing motions, hating that she'd brought it up like the topic was a boring interruption to the night's mirth. "But just cause you're generally a good guy doesn't mean I'm gonna decide you're trustworthy with people's emotions, I mean what could I even know? You can't even keep things straight with your first officer—"

"Oh, don't you even—"

"I couldn't read it because I didn't want to forgive you, and I knew I would have." She rolled her eyes, scoffed at herself as she teetered against the table next to me. "I knew it would _proooobably_ be this sappy, genuine thing, and that was the worst. Cause that's just you, you know, you act like a bastard even though you're _not_ a bastard and then when you need things to even out you just lay yourself open for people, and you've got...Jim Kirk's big fat limitless loving heart, and people see that, and they can't hate you anymore." All this she explained with these seasickish, clumsy motions, immediately interested in somebody else coming up to the bar at the end of her sentences, and I was standing there feeling like I'd been slapped in the face a couple times.

"I was about to tell you how happy I was that you lived," I was suddenly saying, realizing that was exactly what I meant to do, exactly why I brought it up. It kind of took her a few of my words to see I was still talking to her, and she slowly refocused in surprise. "I didn't know where you were assigned. I remember realizing I didn't even know how good you were at what you do, I didn't have any clue if you'd made _Enterprise_. I would have felt like shit if you'd been dead, you have no idea..."

Now she had this almost sweet and dissatisfied frown on her face, her eyes deeply confused on top of only slightly touched. But after a moment she flatly observed, in that mysteriously oracular way of drunks: "It wouldn't have really made you act any different, though."

And you can forget everything I said about Lisa, because she didn't teach me a fucking thing.

Uhura appeared next to me, apparently having merged across the crowd in curiosity at what looked like a fight stirring up, looking concerned and confused. I just gave her a helpless and dismissing look, honestly kind of afraid of what might come out of my mouth next at that point, but she got the message that she should maybe divert Gaila to something else. When they went off arm-in-arm to play some poker, I kept drinking.

I wondered if Nyota was instrumental in getting Bones to come over and babysit me, though he seemed more interested in getting something out of me he could work with than cutting me off of the booze.

"Bones," I groaned after a gulp. "You love me, right?"

He narrowed a look at me. " _What_?"

"Right?"

"You know damn well you'd be a dead man by now if I didn't."

I grinned at him. "See, you are a blessing. Really, because, everything's simple with you. You're a very straightforward kind of guy..."

"Christ."

"And I know that you totally adore me even though I'm a pain in the ass," I rambled on. "And I knew this when you met me—You know, people either love me, or they hate me, and they usually have their minds made up the first minute they come to know me, and I can _always_ tell which way it is. Always. Except for...a couple exceptions..." I trailed off heavily, digging the heel of a hand against my eye, reaching for the next drink I'd just ordered.

There was an unusually insightful concern in Bones. Like I've said, the man isn't stupid. But he couldn't think of anything to do other than pat me on the shoulder and grumble, "You're worrying me, Jim."

"I'll be fine."

He apparently didn't try to convince me I'd had enough, unless I was too insistent and just don't remember being a total ass about it, but he made sure I got back up to the ship okay. I allegedly was found over the sink in the bathroom after I splashed some water on my face, just leaning there with my head between my elbows like I wanted to fall asleep there. But I was so far gone I didn't realize I was being half-carried home until I was tripping over one of the bubbles on the transporter pad, feeling solid arms steadying me back up around my waist.

So far gone, in fact, that the first thing that made me realize who was pulling me along was the fact that he'd said absolutely nothing. To that revelation, I had no resistant nor accepting reaction; everything was slogging and pushing on me and all I could think about was getting to a comfortable horizontal surface. That, and I was pondering distantly how Bones thought he had any business being a manipulative son of a bitch.

It was almost completely dark in my quarters and Spock didn't command the lights on as he efficiently walked me over to the bed. Jesus, I was drunk. I would have told him I was fine by myself minutes before if I hadn't known I'd probably collapse straight to the floor. I'd said nothing, but the tension of the quiet was more impersonal rather than anywhere close to hostile. Maybe just comfortable.

He even took my boots off for me and got me under the blanket. Something was weakening in my chest. I'd spent the whole evening missing him so badly until I could hardly see; now his outline was above me and all I could remember about him was everything that remained stubbornly beautiful even with the distance, which was pretty much everything I could think of.

It was never a matter of overlooking things about him. It always felt like I was fumbling for this impossible compromise, because everything he'd done to me I'd also loved. I didn't want him to change because I needed him to be what he was, rational and controlled and strong in a way I wanted to seize into my grasp all the time. When he'd been willing to throw down his life to save the crew, I'd loved that too. He proves continuously how untouchable he is, and it just makes me want in closer. It was a perfect paradox I was willing to skim around with forever, if only I could say so. But I never had, even once, and even if he felt me thinking it a couple times, it couldn't be the same thing. I'm a very smart guy, I'm almost twenty-seven years old and just now figuring this out.

It should seem fitting that my communications officer was instrumental in showing me how completely stupid I've been. I've thought more about what Nyota said to me, about not really sensing myself when I was connected to him. Among the things I used to get off of him that I didn't quite make sense of, there was for example the time I got attacked by some animal on an M class. We'd hurriedly reconnected mentally once I was beamed back and something had slammed me fast like a hockey puck across ice, in a way that only felt like a short disturbance, like the connection was clumsier because he was distracted.

But maybe not. Because that was the most extreme case of it, but there were other times too when I would say or do something that seemed to push that unfamiliar and breezier change in his thoughts which was less like the usual flush of particular feeling, more like I was realizing the movement of a vast continent I was always standing on. An uncomfortable sensation sometimes, like something was pulling or yanking on me, on the very connection, almost like...

Almost like it, the feeling itself, was somatic. Was me.

After he realized that my arm was hanging weirdly off the bed and reached out to reposition me, I looked straight up at him through the darkness. "'m sorry I've never been him."

The shape of him paused, his figure suspended still over me. The sharp, low way that he enunciated the inquiry, "Who?" seemed to suggest a statement, that I had better not be saying what he thought I was saying.

"You know. The other one."

"The other one," he repeated carefully.

"I think I used to be...or would be, _should_ be...better at this." I swallowed heavily. "I mean, you and I aren't supposed to be—"

"You and I are not them," Spock said flatly.

I wondered if that hurt. I nonsensically muttered, "You said 'sorry' yesterday. On the shuttle..."

"I was referring to the stumble," he insisted with a note of familiar annoyance.

"But you don't apologize, ever. Or at least you sure as hell don't say thanks," I mumbled bitterly.

"I will submit that I owe you an apology, Jim," he quickly replied, knowing where I was going. "But I sense we may approach some disagreement on why I do."

"...What."

"My actions on P'ehra may have been influenced by the evaluation that you would go to reckless lengths to preserve my safety. I maintain that risking my life was not wrong, even if I had to deceive you in the process."

I was staring up in silence for a moment, rock still. I repeated, "Reckless."

He said nothing.

My voice was frank in a drowsy groan of, "Oh, _God_. I think I'd want to smack you if you tried to apologize for fucking me."

Spock shifted in the darkness, but didn't move to leave.

I spoke with even irritation. "I'm sorry I ran out of there right afterwards. I'm sorry I've been a lame excuse for myself and I'm sorry I don't think I can do this without you. I'm sorry for everything and I'm not even the one who's supposed to be apologizing. I'm gonna wake up still mad at you tomorrow and there's nothing I can do about it."

"You are at your most self-deprecating when you are inebriated, Jim, perhaps we should—"

"You are _so_ —" I was hardly even listening to him, I was beyond aggravated, angry with him all over again and all too drunk to think any further than that.

After a moment he let out a sound like a decided sigh. "I would only have you be as I have known you. Goodnight, Jim."

All in a second, I missed myself as badly as I've missed him. And it didn't matter who I was supposed to be or could have been or who my father was or if fate had anything to say about any of it, because I had been better in _this_ life; I had been somebody who would have taken all of this on as just a challenge, something to win, and if my ability to slide through the rough patches had dwindled off a bit it was only because I started caring a hell of a lot more than I used to, and I wanted that back. I wanted Jim Kirk to walk into that room and make Spock stay, and what he would do was on the edge of me but I wasn't quite there, so what I did was I weakly got up on my elbows and sat up and without any kind of permission I pressed a firm statement of a kiss on his lips; and then I dropped back onto my pillow, saying, "Make me forgive you. I dare you."

And I rolled over and fell asleep, but not before the hesitation, the sound of him quietly leaving. I felt something lingering against me after he was gone, a pulling at my mind from a connection that wasn't there, as if I was a phantom limb. I woke up only sad.


End file.
